22 killed in suicide bombing outside marketplace mosques

A suicide bomber has killed 22 people in a crowded market outside two mosques serving separate Muslim sects in Pakistan’s northwest, police and hospital officials said.

Forty-eight people were wounded in the attack in Hangu town, which houses a Shia and a Sunni Muslim mosque.

Officials said the anti-Taliban Sunni Supreme Council often held its meetings in the Sunni mosque, which made it a possible target. However the district police chief said the attack was aimed at Shias and that Sunni Muslims were unintended victims.

“Most of the dead were moving in and out of the mosques in the marketplace after Friday prayers when the bomb went off,” senior police officer Imtiaz Shah said. – (Reuters)